Sermon Thursday - asking questions

[This is the fourth in a week-long series of posts on preparing to preach - the first, from Monday, can be found here...]

Sitting with a text long enough, or walking with it through the week (more realistically) gives you the chance to get past the obvious (especially in such a well-known story as here) to the things that ought to make me sit up and take notice as a preacher...

• Jesus doesn't do this sort of miracle very often - we know for a fact that there was plenty of hunger and real poverty around, so why here and why now? It's nearly as perplexing as the Wedding at Cana miracle - we can understand God providing when there's danger of starvation, or risk of injury if they'd been sent home, but neither is the case. God-in-Jesus doesn't seem to fit our sense of priorities in meeting need...
  
  
• What's the big deal with numbers (5000, twelve baskets) and why all the details (green grass, sitting in groups)?
  
  
• Might the crowd have picked up echoes of Hebrew Scriptures as they sat and ate - God's provision of The Manna in the wilderness strikes me (and many commentators) as being a clear parallel... was that on Jesus' mind too?
  
  
• How unusual would it have been to have a crowd like that up on the hills - would it have been threatening to the authorities (Wright sees it as a threat of revolution - but turning out to be something rather different from what the Romans might have expected)?

That first question is the biggie for me - it's simply not enough to draw a straight line between: "Jesus provided for the crowd" and "God provides today"... because he doesn't (at least, not in that way: the queues of starving children don't often get bread and fish handouts miraculously) and Jesus didn't then... Nor is it good enough to use the "share what we have with God and he will use it..." as the core of the message, since it clearly isn't the core of what Mark is writing (he doesn't even mention the boy with packed lunch!).

The 'trick' with sermon-ing is not to run away from the questions, nor try and answer them too quickly, but to keep coming back to the text with the questions it raises, bringing what you've been reading, praying and thinking - and then to see what it sets you off thinking and asking some more. The prayer is that you 'spiral in' towards what God is saying in a way that is as faithful to your context and to the Word of God as possible.

We'll see where Friday takes me!